Students get money management lessons, free

Experts run workshops at schools and prisons on financial basics

May 13, 2013

Dick Yaffa with My Money, an organization that teaches, for free, money management to high school and college students as well as inmates, teaches an April 25 class to seniors at Tuckahoe High School. / Photos by Ricky Flores/The Journal News

Written by

Richard Yaffa with My Money, an organization that teaches free money management to high school and college students as well as inmates, teaches a class to seniors at Tuckahoe High School on April 25, 2013. ( Ricky Flores / The Journal News ) / Ricky Flores/The Journal News

On the Web

The other volunteer instructors for My Money Workshop are Vicki Goldberg of Edgemont, Paul Katzenstein of Larchmont, Ron Mandel of New YorkCity and Martin Oppenheimer of Mamaroneck. For details, or to volunteer, go to, www.mymoneyworkshop.com.

More

ADVERTISEMENT

An encounter with some college students three years ago left Dick Yaffa worried about their financial behavior.

Yaffa, a Bedford resident who co-founded Manhattan Products Inc. and grew it from a four-employee business into a $65 million household-cleaning products company with 385 workers, said he was troubled by their lack of basic money-management skills.

“They couldn’t figure out why they didn’t have any money by the end of the month,” said Yaffa, a 1950 graduate of New Rochelle High School. “They were spending more money than they had.”

So Yaffa, a Princeton and Harvard alumnus, founded My Money Workshop in the fall of 2009 to teach high school and college students about their finances: how to manage them efficiently and how to prevent costly mistakes.

“With the early availability of credit cards these days, these kids can dig very big holes for themselves that they can’t get out of for a long time,” he said. “And yet, these are not topics discussed in schools or colleges.”

The nonprofit debuted with Yaffa teaching the first workshop at Sarah Lawrence College, and now has six volunteer instructors. The seven-member team has taught at 40 institutions — including two women’s prisons — and reached more than 2,000 students in the Lower Hudson Valley and Connecticut, he said. The group recently celebrated that feat at Beach Point Club in Mamaroneck.

Of course, planting the seed of financial responsibility is not always easy.

“It’s like trying to sell insurance. This is not the type of education most kids get excited about,” said Gary Gordon, the former chief U.S. market strategist for the Swiss bank UBS and a Mamaroneck resident. “They have to be sold on the idea.”

Gordon, who in his former professional life counseled people on investing in credit card companies, now advises students on using them wisely.

“The credit card companies have extremely smart people working for them,” Gordon said. “And they’ve figured out that the way to make profits is in the area of human weakness.”

(Page 2 of 2)

Getting simple ideas such as missing a payment will lead to exorbitant late fees or that overdraft on the debit card would result in a hefty fine, and how all this can affect one’s credit score, is what the volunteers seek to get across in the workshops.

Tiffany Austin, director of career counseling and services at Nyack College, said the workshop focuses on “real-life budgeting concerns” that students need to be aware of.

“It’s an eye-opener for my students. They haven’t spent any time thinking about these things,” Austin said. “To have an outside organization meet with students without any strings attached has been a wonderful service.”

Companies, especially in financial services, often look at a potential employee’s credit score, Yaffa said recently as he addressed a class of Tuckahoe High School seniors.

“People with a good credit score are looked at as being financially mature,” he said. “They’ll say, ‘We like the way they think.’ ”

Carmel resident Helene Reda, a financial services professional, joined the nonprofit after seeing an announcement looking for volunteers in the JPMorgan Chase alumni magazine. Besides teaching at schools and colleges, Reda has been conducting workshops with soon-to-be-released inmates at two women’s prisons: the Taconic and Beacon correctional facilities.

“They are a forgotten group who will soon be entering a world they might no longer be familiar with,” Reda said. “I speak to women who have Ph.D.s and women who have not completed high school. Ultimately, many of these women will be supporting their families. It’s a very rewarding and fulfilling experience.”

Yaffa said he hopes to expand the workshops to reach more schools and colleges, and is looking for corporate partnerships that would defray some of the costs.

“Right now, it’s all through personal grants that we are functioning,” he said. The nonprofit has only one paid employee, an administrative coordinator who runs the daily operations.

Roberto Henriquez, 21, a sophomore at Mercy College majoring in social work, said the workshops got him thinking about his spending habits.

“I go every semester to the workshop and, every semester, I learn a new trick to save me money while I am in college and when I leave college,” he said. “It allows me to better prepare myself for life after college.”